american mead maker spring 2013

Questions and Answers Questions and Answers

Meadery Spotlite: Meadery Spotlite: Kookoolan World Meadery Kookoolan World Meadery

Meet the Mead Maker Meet the Mead Maker

Ten Lessons from Ten Lessons from the Hive the Hive

Mead Competitions Mead Competitions

Entrepreneurial Interview Request Jeff Herbert and Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor

Red BordersAmerican Mead Maker is published on a quarterly basis.

For advertising information and submission guidelines contact the editor: [email protected]

Cover: Jeff Herbert of Superstition Meadery tests the brix of a fermenting py-ment. Photo by Jennifer Herbert

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Meet 3 Liquid ArtistsAlgomah MeaderySuperstition MeaderyMoonstuck Meadery

Kookoolan World MeaderyChrissie Manion Zaerpoor

A TEDx PresentationMelissa Hronkin

Home and Commercial CompetitionChris

RED BORDERSAmerican Mead MakerSpring 2013

Letter From The EditorLetter From The Editor Welcome back to another seasonal issue of American Welcome back to another seasonal issue of American Mead Maker. Just in time for the Mazer Cup International Mead Maker. Just in time for the Mazer Cup International mead competition in Boulder, CO we are pleased to mead competition in Boulder, CO we are pleased to bring more coverage of the mead industry to your bring more coverage of the mead industry to your attention. In this issue you will receive personal insight attention. In this issue you will receive personal insight into several mead makers in 3 diff erent states. We into several mead makers in 3 diff erent states. We discuss start-up business questions posed to 2 mead discuss start-up business questions posed to 2 mead owners and you will learn all about Kookoolan World owners and you will learn all about Kookoolan World Meadery through the gifted writing of the owner/mead Meadery through the gifted writing of the owner/mead maker. Additionally, we are honored to share a TEDx maker. Additionally, we are honored to share a TEDx presentation prepared by an American mead maker presentation prepared by an American mead maker and we talk mead competitions. So pour yourself a and we talk mead competitions. So pour yourself a glass of your favorite mead, put your feet up and enjoy glass of your favorite mead, put your feet up and enjoy the Spring issue of American Mead Maker. the Spring issue of American Mead Maker.

Until next time,Until next time,

Jeff HerbertJeff Herbert

Entreprenuerial Interview RequestBy Jeff Herbert and Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor

In February a student at the University of Arizona, Benjamin Boorem, solicited interview responses from 2 meaderies for a project on entrepreneurial business. He had some good ques-tions, and I thought it would be interesting to our readers to read the responses from the owners of Superstition Meadery in Prescott, Arizona alongside answers to the same questions from the owner of Kookoolan World Meadery in Yamhill, Oregon.

What were the greatest obstacles to starting a Meadery and how did you overcome them?

Superstition Meadery

First of all you have to figure out how to make mead, if you are the owner and mead maker. So I spent a few years engaged in trial and error, entering competitions for feedback and to prove recipes, and learning about what equipment is necessary. Once you have a prod-uct that you think you can sell, you have to learn about all of the regulatory barriers which in the case of starting a winery are great. Concurrently with researching how to get a meadery going I was re-

searching how to start a Brewery. I attended a 3 day course taught at the Siebel Institute in Chicago on this subject. The subject matter and instructors were first class and I learned much about the alcohol industry and how to start a busi-ness. In addition to reading all of the entrepreneurial brewery books and countless hours on the inter-net I also interviewed brewery and meadery owners across the coun-try through visits, phone calls and emails. So once you decide to get going you need a space to legally produce your product. So I had to decide where to open my business and how much

space I would need. I was living in the East Valley of PHX at the time and my family and I decided to move to Prescott. Better weather, schools, environment and an up and coming craft beverage scene. During my first visit to Juniper Well Ranch and Vine-yards in Skull Valley, just west of Prescott, I left the winery with an invitation from the owners to make mead there. Fast forward 7 months and we applied to the Feds and State to become the first Alternating Pro-prietorship in AZ. This means that I rent a small space in an existing win-ery. 7 more months later and all was approved. Oh yeah, and supply chain management. Have you ever opened up a book on how to start a meadery in AZ? No you haven’t. I had to figure out everything. I am the art depart-ment, web master, mead maker, sales department etc. Lately my wife has come online as the financial manager.

Kookoolan World Meadery

The biggest obstacle was just figur-ing out WHAT licensing was needed. As I outlined in the story I sent you, there are 22 licenses and approvals needed in Oregon. But there is no

LIST of what they are, what order to get them in, etc. Most wineries hire an attorney to do the wholeprocess for them.

How restrictive are the federal and state laws to open your Meadery and sell your product to the pub-lic?


They are very complex. It is almost a universal experience that everyone has their federal application returned for one reason or another to make cor-rections. In my case they eventually sent a letter saying that I was not approved since I had not responded to their corrections I had to make. It turned out that they misspelled hotmail and I never received the no-tification. Lots of delays occur. When I first called the State DLLC I was told that it is illegal to make mead. The government is full of folks who are misinformed, as well as other folks who are helpful and full of expertise. Who you get on the phone or assigned to process your applica-tion greatly affects your results. You have to put in your time, ask lots of

questions, and like any business have some mentors in your field to rely on.


“Restrictive” and “obstacles” are words that rub me the wrong way. There are requirements and you just have to put in the calories to un-derstand and comply with them. Any degree you want to earn has a set of graduation requirements, a Program of Study, and minimum GPA that must be earned. ANY business you want to start up has regulations.

Are there a lot of regulations for engaging in selling your product between different states?


I don’t sell out of state yet, but yes. Check out the Fedex website on wine shipping for good info on interstate shipping regs. Heck, UPS told me last week that it is impossible to ship wine out of AZ. I know of one win-ery exporting to Australia, so you can never take no for an answer, or if you do temporarily, find another per-son or business that will work with

you. I spoke with the lead investiga-tor for Arizona recently and he said that as long as the receiving customer is over 21, and I comply with inter-state shipping regs, I am good to go.


I focus on Oregon. We ship throughNorthwest Wines To You, which is a business run by our local monastery.They service dozens of local winer-ies and do all the shipping out ofstate. I know that Oregon requires me to have a shipper’s license to shipout of state. I know that most states require you to have a shipper’slicense for THAT state, to ship into that state. I’m not interested inresearching, obtaining, and main-taining 49 other states’ licenses.

When you began your business, how did you gauge your target market and decide how much product to initially produce?


I wrote a decent business plan, and identified through research and inter-views, that my target market would

be educated craft beer and wine drinkers. I have a strategy that I am still evaluating which is to make a great variety of meads and a hard cider, and see what sells. I make some 25 gallon batches and mostly 50 gallon batches. This was based on equipment and space limitations, re-alistic batch sizes, and my budget.


I didn’t. I’m really a homebrewer who outgrew my hobby and wanted to be able to sell what I produce because I can’t drink it all and it’s expensive to make. I made a 42-gallon batch ini-tially because that’s the largest fer-menter I could buy through our local homebrew supply store.

Approximately how much capital is required, in your opinion, to es-tablish a successful meadery?


I have put around 25k into the proj-ect and many many hours. And I have set up a situation where I have very low overhead. Much of this invest-ment was out of pocket, some in the

form of a 3% credit card “loan,” and I forecast to have no business debt by 2014. Then of course it will be time to expand. I have done this al-most as small as possible to get going and prove if my ideas are feasible with out risking too much. I knew that I would make lots of mistakes, and have a huge learning curve and I wanted these mistakes to be inex-pensive. The answer to this question is directly proportional to the poten-tial risk, previous experience of the founders, and particular scenario the entrepreneur envisions.


There’s no way one model can answer this question. Mine was very small to get the first 42-gallon batch out the door because I already had the building built. However, the poured concrete underground building expan-sion I now aspire to will be about $50,000 plus the fermenters I want to put into it are $11,000 EACH. I just spent $3,500 on 167 cases (ie, not many) of empty glass bottles for bottling my current batch of Vin de Noix. How much capital you need de-pends upon whether you’re starting

from scratch, how rapidly you want to grow, how much you want to pro-duce, and how long you want to age the Mead before it goes up for sale. Ageing is probably the biggest cost factor: holding the finished wine in tanks, barrels, or bottles requires a LOT of temperature-controlled area, andthat’s expensive. We are adamant not to incur any debt at all beyond ourfirst mortgage on the property, so that boundary condition plus investing togrow the rest of the business has slowed down the growth of Mead production.

What percentage of your funds have been allocated to marketing/advertising, and how important do you feel that it is to success of your meadery?


Very low really. I guess you could say that giving mead away at events for 1.5 years was marketing, but besides that I haven’t paid for anything but a few signs at my accounts. So un-der 5%. I don’t budget for advertising and the only add I run is in Ameri-can Mead Maker.


Zero, believe it or not. Although once I have a bigger volume to sell I do think it will be necessary. I think marketing is very necessary; advertis-ing maybe not so much. Most of the work of “selling” a bottle of Mead is actually educating people about what Mead is. I think the indus-try is poised to take off, just as ci-der and sake have done recently. The more Meaderies there are out there the better; truly we don’t compete with each other for Mead business; rather, we work together to educatepeople about how Mead is made, and getting people interested in the Meadexperience.

Finally, if given the chance to redo the process of starting up andestablishing your business, what would you have done differently?


I may have gone with screen print-ing on bottles instead of applying la-bels. Otherwise everything is going as planned, slow and steady. Lately things are beginning to pick up for us and I am looking forward to a

great year and our first expansion in early 2014.


I would’ve been bolder and jumped in for higher volume straightaway. The demand is there, and it’s my favorite part of the business.

Photo: Jeff Herbert moves boiling water around inside a bourbon barrel. Photo By Luke Herbert

By Chrissie Manion ZaerpoorProprietor and Meadmaker

The BackstoryMy fascination with Mead be-gan when I was still under-age: “Beowulf” in tenth-grade English class. I had an excel-lent and handsome young in-structor and if anybody in class showed an interest in anything, he pounced on that enthusiasm to try to motivate the rest of the class. As a result we had prob-ably more discussion about Mead than any English class before or since, and he encour-aged my extra-credit research into the topic. Years later when I was at Arizona State Univer-sity, I heard for the fi rst time about a Renaissance Festival, and thought that of course there would be Mead there, what

other reason would there be? At a time in my life when both money and time were precious, I spent too much of both to go, and found Budweiser and Co-ors’ Light to be the only drinks there. Very disappointing. In 1996, I was going for a walk in my new neighborhood in Hill-sboro, Oregon, when I walked past, and then turned around and walked into, Main Street Homebrew Supply, and began fi nally to dabble in Meadmak-ing. I’ve been hooked ever since. Made dozens of small batch-es. Read all the books and leg-ends. Decided to someday have a Meadery somehow named for Cuchulain (pronounced koo-CULL-en, a Mead-swilling cat-tle rustler from ancient Irish lit-erature) but couldn’t fi gure out how to make that work, since

hardly anybody has ever heard of him, and it looks unpro-nounceable spelled in Gaelic!

Where does the name come from?My husband Koorosh had a childhood n i c k n a m e K o o k o o l a n (pronounced K O O - k o o -lan). The fi rst time I heard his older brother call him that, I heard “Cuch-ulain” and al-most fell out of my chair. It became something of an inside joke between us, and when it was time for us to name our farm, no other name was even on

the table. Our farm is Kookool-an Farms, and was founded in 2005. The name Kookoolan World Meadery anchors the Meadery to the farm and em-phasizes the diversity of Mead

styles we in-tend to pro-duce: more of a Mead du Jour than one or two sta-ble products. I’m more of a dabbler or a Mead anthro-pologist, fas-cinated by all the myriad styles from all places and times around the world. It seems to me s i n g u l a r l y beautiful and unifying that in all places and times, someone has made Mead, and that Mead

has borne the unique mark of that place, time, and culture. Just a Little About the FarmKookoolan Farms is a diversi-fi ed grass-based small farm. We’re not certifi ed organic, but we have never bought or used any synthetic fertilizer, herbi-cide, pesticide, or fungicide in the eight years we’ve ben here. We raise chickens for meat and eggs; keep a few Jersey dairy cows; and have a few acres in vegetables that we sell through a CSA subscription program. We have the largest and most complete selection of home cheesemaking supplies any-where in the Northwest, with about $25,000 in inventory, ev-erything you need to make any kind of cheese you can think of, more than 60 diff erent cultures, fi ve kinds of lipase, three kinds of rennet. We off er cheesemak-ing classes. We’ve become a loose co-op of small livestock farms, and with our partners are able to off er three diff er-ent kinds of pasture-raised pork; beef; lamb; veal; ducks

and rabbits. And we make Kombucha, Mead, and dessert wines. (Our classroom is also a fully-licensed tasting room, although it really doesn’t aes-thetically function as such yet.)

Bootstrap Start-upWe bought our farm in Octo-ber 2005, and immediately set to work trying to set up income streams. We started chickens, built fences and outbuildings, learned to butcher chickens and milk cows, and started re-building our 1905 farmhouse. We converted an existing 20 foot X 30 foot two-story outbuilding into a poultry slaughterhouse: six months a year, one day a week, we hand-butcher about 300 poultry animals. And the other 340 days of the year, the building is idle. Mind you, this is a fully licensed and inspect-ed food processing plant, with stainless steel walls, coved base-boards, enamel-painted fl oors sloping to drains, triple sinks, food-grade hoses, and certifi ed City water from a source in Ore-gon’s Coast Range. Meanwhile,

in the background, the dream of opening my own Meadery was never far beneath the sur-face. As I continued to “dig in” to reading all the legal codes on wineries and breweries, the “ah-ha” moment fi nally hit me: everything we had put into the slaughterhouse made the same building the ideal small winery. It would be trivial to convert the building to a winery, or for that matter to any kind of food processing facility including a creamery. What I didn’t want to have to do was build a second, separate, $80,000 licensed fa-cility dedicated just to making Mead, sitting there idle half the time while my slaughterhouse sat idle the other half of the time. Finally I had a conver-sation with our food safety in-spector: if we sold the property and someone wanted to use the building as a creamery or a win-ery, would that indeed be a triv-ial license conversion? Oh yes. What if I didn’t sell the property, but I got tired of killing chick-ens, could *I* easily convert the building to one of those other

licenses? Oh yes. What if I only wanted to kill poultry from May through November, and make Mead from December through April? Could I switch back and forth? His eyes almost popped out of his head thinking about all the extra work he’d have to do visiting me three or four times a year instead of just once. I calmly told him I didn’t really care about the extra work for him, and of course I’d be happy to pay for both licenses; what I didn’t want was to have a build-ing sitting idle so much of the year, and not to build a second under-utilized dedicated-use facility. Finally he conceded that there were a few wineries that also make fruit jellies, and I knew I was onto something.

LicensingLicensing requirements vary greatly state to state. I couldn’t fi nd any single source to tell me all the licenses I needed, and everywhere I turned I found another approval neces-sary. I started making a note-book, then a spreadsheet. I

tried mapping it as a fl ow chart, then as a project schedule, then as a budget. But no one could tell me my list was complete. Fi-nally after discussing my goals on the phone with the instruc-tor, I enrolled in a one-semester graduate course at the Cheme-keta Viticulture program in Sa-lem, Oregon, an hour away. My class project was to come up with a complete licensing plan, including all necessary agen-cies and approvals, what order to get them in, how to apply for them all, how much they all cost, and how long the whole thing was going to take. And in-deed a semester later I had com-piled it: to go from zero to sell-ing bottled Mead required no fewer than 22 licenses, permits, approvals, and label approv-als from multiple county, state, and federal agencies. Yikes.

This is where my engineering management background came into play: this was just a complex engineering project. I mapped it all out and got to work. Mean-while, with skills learned from

my attorney father and ad-vice from my attorney younger brother, I kept gently working on the inspectors until fi nally I found the magic phrase: “mul-tiple use facilty.” I believe that I am the owner of the only build-ing in the United States ever to be simultaneously licensed as both a poultry processing facil-ity and as a winery. “Kookool-an Meatery and Meadery”??? If there’s a marketing angle there, I’m sure I don’t know what it is, but with this fi nal piece in place, we fi nally received our li-cense to operate on November 9, 2009! We managed to get our little Meadery off the ground and operational with no bor-rowed money and no outside in-vestors. Of course, our capacity was little more than large-scale homebrewing, but it was a start.

Teaming up with Doug Rem-ingtonI had made dozens of batches of meads over a period of some 13 years, but my largest batch to date had been a mere 13 gal-lons. With my new $1,700 coni-

cal 42-gallon Fermenator and some $500 worth of honey, I didn’t want to screw things up. So I invited my old friend Doug-las Remington to come over for a day of large-scale home-brewing to help me make sure everything went according to plan. Douglas has been advis-ing home Meadmakers at Main Street Homebrew Supply for more than a decade, had made hundreds of gallons of excel-lent Meads, had judged Mead, beer, and wine competitions, and is the author of www.Tra-dionalMead.com. Turns out we get along splendidly as work partners: we’re both commit-ted to turning out the highest-quality, interesting Meads pos-sible with no cutting corners.

Our MeadsOur fi rst commercial Mead was a Metheglin inspired by a 3-pound basket of fragrant Ha-banero peppers at the farmer’s market in the summer of 2009. On impulse I bought them; took them home and put them in the refrigerator a few days; in

desperation I steeped them in hot water and then poured the juice into a fi ve-gallon batch of plain Mead I had going in the house (this was a few months before we were licensed). Lat-er, when it was cleared, I tasted it before bottling (ostensibly to adjust the fl avors) and smoke and steam poured out of my ears, eyes, nose, and mouth for a good 15 minutes. The mixing began in earnest, and I realized I would need some 50 gallons of plain mead to dilute the Ha-banero Mead. Thus was borne our Spice Road Mead, with the heat of the peppers tem-pered with saff ron and vanilla. Our second was not a Mead at all, but Vin de Noix, an ancient French aperitif made by har-vesting young green walnuts on Bastille Day or thereabouts, when the immature nuts are fully formed but still so soft that a sewing needle may easily pass through. They are steeped in red wine and brandy for sev-eral months, along with added orange peel, vanilla, cloves, and sugar; then strained and bot-

tled in time for the winter holi-days. This is an unusual, old-fashioned, and cheering drink, very warming for our cold, dark, wet winters here in the Northwest. It’s been very popu-lar and will be a regular product for us. It’s also great use for our single magnifi cent 100-year-old English walnut tree!Best of all has been the Dwoj-niak-style mead we named Przselenie Zimawe: The Winter Solstice (in Polish). Massive-ly rich, made from equal parts honey and water by volume, eight pounds of honey per gal-lon of water, with no added fl a-vors, but then aged in a Bour-bon barrel. We’re only sorry we tried it out with such a small batch; it sold out almost imme-diately. Now we’re eager to re-ceive our new nine-barrel coni-cal fermenter later this year to make a much bigger batch!We also have a semi-dry mead in progress nearly ready to bottle, and lots more planned!

Sourcing Our HoneyMy husband Koorosh grew up

in Shiraz, Iran, and had his uni-versity education interrupted by the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Because he is not Muslim, Koorosh was unable to attend university, work, or emigrate legally. As a result, for several years he worked cash labor odd jobs around Shiraz, mostly con-struction and agriculture. In that context he spent one sum-mer as a beekeeper, the sole em-ployee for a family business that kept about 500 hives and moved them around to pollinate the almond and citrus groves in the surrounding countryside. You can imagine how my eyes lit up when I discovered that in addi-tion to everything else, the man of my dreams was also a bee-keeper! But, alas, it was a pret-ty crummy job: packing up the hives at night, loading them on the truck, moving them to an-other location 20 miles away, coming back to the fi rst loca-tion for a second trip, and then sleeping outside during the day. To the idea of keeping bees on our farm, Koorosh’s answer was not just “no”: it was “hell no.”

Did you already know that federal regula-tions allow you to have a winery on your res-idential property, but not a brewery? And that wineries cannot use malted grain in any of their beverages? Thus, sadly, Kookoolan World Meadery will never produce a Brag-got. A smaller factor leading us to decide on a winery rather than brewery license is our location, right in the middle of the Yamhill-Carlton AVA region of Oregon’s north Willa-mette Valley: we are surrounded by dozens of excellent wineries, and our address on Highway 47 puts us right on the “Sip 47” wine route, perhaps the only published wine route in the country that includes not only winer-ies but also cideries, a sakery, a few brewer-ies, and our Kombuchery and Meadery! This also makes it a terrifi c neighborhood for fi nd-ing mentors: several of the local winemakers buy their families’ eggs, milk, meat, and veg-etables at Kookoolan Farms, making it easy to build relationships with this community.

(At which point the thought did cross my mind as to whether this was just a Tall Tale; until a wild hive settled on a fallen stump at our next door neighbor’s place; turns out our neighbor Ken had been wanting to keep a hive for a long time and had all the sup-plies, but he had never handled bees. Koorosh enthusiastical-ly said, “well, let’s go catch the bees!” Ken said that although he had all the hive components, he did not have the suit and hood yet. Koorosh said, “that’s just for Americans, we don’t need a suit.” Off they went to Ken’s garage, and sure enough, Koorosh deftly installed the box over the swarm of bees, came back after dark and moved the box to where Ken wanted it, all without suit or hood, and with-out getting stung once. Some of this “estate” honey found its way into one of our Meads.)

So our role in the honey pro-duction of Yamhill County is to provide ourselves as a buyer of well-produced local hon-eys, hopefully encouraging

more people to keep bees. It’s a great place to do it as we are surrounded by hazelnut or-chards and literally thousands of acres of raspberries, black-berries, plums, and other fruit trees here in Yamhill County. In addition to buying some di-rect from small beekeepers, we also buy some through “My Lo-cal Honey,” a Willamette Val-ley co-op, through GloryBee honey distributor in Eugene, Oregon, and we intend to bring in some exotic honeys as well.

Chrissie and Koorosh

In addition to Mead, K o o k o o l a n W o r l d Meadery also pro-duces a few unusual wines. They’re currently bottling their third year of Vin de Noix, an ancient French cor-dial made by steeping young walnut fruits in red wine and brandy, along with spices.

Kookoolan World Meadery’s Kombucha is not your supermar-ket Kombucha: it’s brewed under the winery license and contains 1.5% alcohol. No vinegar fl avors. It’s a clean, thirt-quenching fu-sion of cider, iced tea, and wheatbeer fl avors. The fruity aromas come from the custom tea blend made specially for Kookoolan World Meadery by local Tao of Tea: it’s an organic Ceylon tea with an amped-up amount of bergamot oil because unlike a hot cup of tea, Kombucha is mostly enjoyed ice cold and right out of the bot-tle.

Our PackagingThe fi rst bottle design was in-spired by the sleeve tattoo of my grown son Sam, and drawn by his tattoo artist. The bottle was lovely but the real break-through was realizing that it would be better executed with silkscreening than on a paper label. Paper labels really re-quire professional designing to print beautifully, and require expensive multi-color printing on expensive paper stock. They also require specialized equip-ment for applying. By contrast, silkscreening is done directly on the bottle and all that’s left to be done is to fi ll the bottle and cork it. Also, Meads age well for decades; just a few months before, we had been to a dinner party at friends opening a few 20-year-old bottles of wine that had been cellared: the labels had deteriorated beyond read-ing. Silkscreening is far more ro-bust for long storage, and can’t be marred or torn or wetted like a paper label. The downside is if you overestimate the number of bottles needed, they can’t be

used for any other product! Tri-S in Tualatin, Oregon, is an ab-solutely wonderful bottle silk-screener who does the bottles for Rogue Ales and many other brands a lot bigger than us. So far our volumes have been so small that we’ve only been able to use their one-color, small-volume printing machine, with the ink being cured afterward on a separate belt oven. (Our Vin de Noix bottle can’t be silk screened because it is so tall and skinny that it falls over in the cure oven before the ink is cured, resulting in a smeared mess, so that’s why we have a pa-per label for that.) But Tri-S also has a high-precision, four-col-or, it-situ-UV-cure machine too, that requires a minimum order of 10,000 bottles to use. We’re looking forward to more sophis-ticated artwork in the future!Our bottles have all come from Saxco Pacifi c Coast in Vancou-ver, Washington, and they have a warehouse based in Cali-fornia’s wine country as well. They have two separate divi-sions that off er beer bottles

and wine bottles, respectively.When we were getting ready to ramp up our production of Kombucha, I got a referral to a “brand developer” marketing specialist in Portland who has worked with some of the best-known wineries plus Nike here in Oregon. I met with her and got a quote on brand develop-ment: the quote was for $45,000 to name the product, choose the packaging, design the label and a few accessory items such as window stickers and table cards, and to develop a single-page, non-active website (basi-cally, just a one-page fl yer). I fi gured that meant that I would have to sell the fi rst 45,000 bot-tles of Kombucha just to pay her, at a time that I was manufactur-ing 75 gallons a week of Kom-bucha. So I sat down with our egg cartons and business cards, which had been designed by our architect, and spent three days coming up with the Kom-bucha bottle design myself. While I’m sure the profession-al would have come up with a better design, it is also brutally

clear that DIY was a better busi-ness decision: the design is simple, clean, consistent with our farm brand, and paid me the best wage I’ve ever made in my life, some $60,000 for three days of work! (A penny saved is better than a penny earned be-cause you don’t have to pay tax-es on it!) Absolutely there is a time and a place for profession-al graphic design, and in no way do I mean to imply otherwise, but don’t be afraid to see what you can come up with yourself!!

Plans for the FutureWe’re bullish on Mead, and are fi nalizing plans for a larger poured-concrete, partially-un-derground Meadery expansion building to go in later in 2013. This will provide a lot more area for ageing tanks, barrels, and storage of empty and fi lled bottles.

Checkout Kookoolan World Meadery on the web and stay tuned for more writing from this American Mead Maker.

Meet the Mead MakerMoonstruck Meadery Algomah Meadery Superstition Meadery

Moonstruck Meadery was named after the March 2011, Su-per Moon, which occurs every 18 years. The Mead Maker and Owner, Brian Schlueter, has created many libations of Mead begining his mead adventures from 1990 till today, from a small Island in Japan called Okinawa. His passion and love for making mead stems from years of homebrewing, and interest in educating others on the art of craft beverages.

Luke Schlueter, oldest son to Moonstruck Meadery owner Bri-an Schlueter, has teamed up with his father to build and grow Moonstruck Meadery. Luke joined his father on Thursday, July 12th 2012, and has already stepped in to take over the distribu-tion of getting Mead into the hands of local businesses as well as assisting his father in the day to day Management Operations of Moonstruck.

Luke brings with him a passion, desire, and love for Mead and the art of Mead making. He has crafted his own Mead while active in the military. Luke will take over full time operations of Moonstruck in the near future as his father teaches him the nuances and intricacies of the father/son business. Both share an aspiration in producing the finest quality Mead locally, region-ally and nationally. (See Brian and Luke on previous spread)

It is nothing less than fitting that the place of Melis-sa Hronkin and John Hersman’s honey operations happens to be a historical Catholic church in Greenland, MI. As caretakers of this church, the two are acutely aware that their honeybees have, in a sense, come full circle. The Catholic Church has a long history with honeybees – the monks being the first beekeepers who produced wax for the church’s candles.

John and Melissa produce everything from raw honey to olive oil soaps, making it appear as though it is not possible to not be inspired while living on 38 acres of old farm fields filled with clover, trefoil and basswood trees. Beekeeping strikes the perfect balance between John’s culinary experience and Melissa’s art background (Melissa is an elementary school teacher, an adjunct professor at Finlandia and a practicing artist showing around the U.P.), and it allows them to combine their environmental passion with their interest in artisanal food products and gardening. For the couple, beekeeping and its process allows for creativity. It is both a passion and a lifestyle that they plan to continue by means of sustainable methods. John and Melissa have bee yards in

Ontonagon and Houghton County, keeping between 50 and 100 hives. Since U.P. honey is harvested just once per year in August, the bees’ hives yield on average 60-80 pounds of honey each. The raw honey has not been over heated or filtered so that the honey retains its unique and complex flavors and beneficial nu-trients. The honey itself is spun on a 20 frame extractor. It is then filtered and bottled by hand in the church kitchen. John and Melissa’s candles and soaps are also made in the church kitchen.(Photos by Melissa Hronkin of Algomah Meadery)

Superstition Meadery is a Federal and State

licensed winery that produces a variety of honey

based wines (mead) and hard cider. The core

of the Superstition Meadery is the husband

and wife team of Jeff and Jen Herbert. Their

skill sets compliment each other and work har-

moniously in a left brain/right brain manner

to facilitate a positive working environment.

Jeff brings to the table a creative energy that

has resulted in our company making a diver-

sity of fantastic meads from ingredients such

as Tahitian vanilla beans, Spanish saffron,

Marion berries, and toasted Hungarian oak.

Jen makes the business successful with her no-

nonsense approach to managing fi nances, re-

cord keeping and facilitating communication.

We are a small business, but we are gaining

momentum because our current production ca-

pacity is maxed out and demand for our prod-

ucts continues to grow. We are carving a niche of

awareness in the world of small batch alcoholic

beverages. We only use Arizona honey in our

meads, which is mixed with water from a deep

high desert well. We believe in making unique

products serving a diversity of palates. We are

the fi rst alternating proprietorship in Arizona,

which means that we lease a space in an existing

winery allowing us to signifi cantly lower over-

head expenses and share equipment. We have

returning customers, additional accounts lined

up to carry our products, and have caught the

beginning of a new wave in a fresh industry.

We are proud to be founding members of the

American Mead Makers Association and we

hope to be a part of helping our industry grow.

(Previous Spread: Jeff and Jen Herbert)

Check back next time to meet more American Mead Makers...

Crisis of the Colony: Millions of bees dis-appearing from hives, fi rst seen in 2005-2006, caught the attention of the media and the honeybee that is responsible for every 1/3 bite of food we eat. The gradu-al decline of pollinators has been occur-ring for years, but this was something different, more catastrophic. I remember the day if fi nally hit me-- the “mysteri-ous die-off” of my name-sake, Apis Mel-lifera, fl oored me. In the summer of 2008, my husband and I got our fi rst two bee-hives, and I began working in encaustics, or painting with beeswax. This crisis or call for alarm spurned a collective “wake up call” for beekeepers, gardeners, art-ists, and foodies alike. Within crisis lies opportunity for greater awareness, appre-ciation, and re-focus. By directly partici-pating in beekeeping, we are engaging in this ancient and sacred art—this collabo-ration between humans and insects and fl owers: symbiosis in its highest form.

Super-organism: Entomologists consider the colony as a superorganism. Like or-

gans in a body, bees provide different functions for the hive to sustain itself as a whole. An individual bee without a colony cannot survive for long. At the height of summer, a bee colony contains anywhere from 40-60,000 bees. There is one queen, several thousand male bees (drones) and the rest are worker bees (fe-males). The queen spends her day lay-ing eggs, while the worker bees (living a short 6 week life in the summer) has a dif-ferent job each week of its life. Scientists propose that evolving into this superor-ganism is what makes possible a whole new level of complexity for the colony. What could we as a community accom-plish if we focused on what was good for the hive rather than the individual?

The Alchemist: the last few weeks of her life -- are spent foraging for honey and pollen. Forager bees suck nectar from fl owers using a long proboscis and stow the nectar in a special sac called a honey stomach, where the nectar mixes with enzymes; when a forager returns to the

comb where it is evaporated into honey. Simultaneously, worker bees collect pol-len in pollen sacs on their rear legs; this is also brought back to the hive to be used as food, but in the process of col-lecting nectar and pollen, bees inadver-tently transfer pollen from fl ower to fl ow-er. Alchemy: turning nectar into honey. Lead into gold. As a teacher and an art-ist, I feel like my job is also a lot about alchemy: taking everyday materials and resurrecting them as “art”. Teachers, I feel, are also alchemists: we strive to help our students turn the knowledge or nec-tar into their own honey, their passion.

Winged Apothecary: Propolis is a sticky resin, which seeps from the buds of cer-tain trees. The bees gather propolis, sometimes called bee glue and carry it home in their pollen baskets. The worker bees then take the resinous material and add salivary secretions and wax fl akes to it and use the bee propolis in two ways: fi rstly to reinforce the hive itself, and secondly propolis protects the hive from bacterial and viral infection. Propolis and Honey are becoming more commonly used in burn treatment on humans and wound therapy because of the antibacte-rial properties. The gifts of the hive have myriad healthful benefi ts to humans, as the bees are very hygienic and honey is the only food that never spoils if har-vested properly. If you ARE interested in fermenting the honey, so were your ancestors. MEAD is the oldest ferment-ed beverage according to many sourc-es: honey, water, and some wild yeasts. If the other gifts of the hive don’t heal what’s ailing you, this surely will put a smile on your face! We have the medi-

cine for what we need at our fi ngertips.

Honeycomb: Young bees are also in-volved in wax production. Wax is secret-ed from wax glands, located inside the last four ventral sections of the abdomen, and is used to build honeycombs, either for storage of honey or for use as brood cells. New wax is also needed to repair old cells, and to cap cells (honeycombs as well as brood cells. The perfect geometry of these cells, where the bees grow, and sometimes go to die, is the most effi cient use of space. Given a hollow cavity, bees do what is called “festooning”…they link together to measure the space and build their ideal perfect environment. Such ele-gance and effi ciency of space is something to strive for in our lives and communities.

Which leads me to….

The Hive: Home and the hive: I think if we pay attention closely enough, we can only hope to be so effi cient and intui-tive to needs. Re-using and re-purposing spaces to fi t our needs is a sustainable way of keeping our landscape’s aesthetic while making it relevant to our needs. My husband and I set up our honey house in the former Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Greenland, MI. This space was sitting vacant since 1995, and we have now turned it into our production area for spin-ning honey and making mead, while the upstairs has become a community gather space for sharing music, art, and stories. The potential is overwhelming, and as caretakers of this historical building, this hive, we feel an obligation to keep it sa-cred and shared, and a place of inspiration.

Swarm: Swarming is the natural means of reproduction of honey bee colonies. A new honey bee colony is formed when the queen bee leaves the colony with a large group of worker bees, a process called swarming. In the prime swarm, about 60% of the worker bees leave the original hive location with the old queen. This swarm can contain thousands to tens of thousands of bees. It is loud, chaotic, and a bit unsettling at fi rst….until you realize it is nature’s way of dividing the colony: from one you now have 2. Only the bees know why they swarm! We have the pleasure of many of our hives close to our house, so we have witnessed many a swarm. Taking the less invasive style of beekeeping, we often don’t try to artifi -cially prevent them as some modern bee-keepers do. Divergent thinking: Some of my biggest breakthroughs have come when I stop trying to make my initial idea work, and instead take a radical ap-proach to solve the problem—just like a swarm. It is good to know when to swarm.

Wintering: After the honey fl ow and har-vest, the hive begins to prepare itself for winter. The drones (male bees) are kicked out of the hive, the queen stops laying eggs, and therefore the population drops. They need enough bees to keep the tem-perature high enough through cold winter months, but not too large so they will burn through honey stores too quickly. The honeymoon is over, so to speak, and now it is all about survival. If the hive is healthy, they create a cluster around the queen bee, and circulate from inside the cluster to outside..gathering honey and deliver-ing it throughout the population, and to the queen. This time of repose, quiet, and

“dreaming of fl owers” is something that we Northerners have come to expect, need, and secretly love. We thrive in adversity.

Spring: survive and thrive. Will the hives survive? Next comes the daunting task of assessing the hives in spring-time, which in the UP can sometimes be April. A sense of loss and guilt comes when we fi ne a dead hive---the wreckage of winter…maybe they didn’t starve, but maybe the queen died and the colony lost its sense of pur-pose…sometimes they make it through deep winter, only to perish in March. Nev-ertheless, some colonies come through strong, and are bubbling over with bees come May. Those that survive, thrive---and can produce lots of extra happy hon-ey because the queen begins to lay eggs in Feb. or March. With the fi rst bloom of dandelions or crocus, they are rocking and rolling, in their already established hive. We too, can survive and thrive through the rough spots and long winters and come out of it stronger having endured.

You get what you give: Take care of the bees and they’ll take care of us. What Beekeeping Has Taught Me about Al-chemy, Sustainability, and Community? I can only hope that this small gesture, this passion of ours, this Keeping the Bees--will help the collective honeybee health. If we start seeing our endeavors, lives, communities, more as a superor-ganism rather than independent, sepa-rate entities, perhaps our greater purpose and organic complexity will emerge as well. If we can see our feeble attempts and daily efforts at life as spinning gold like the alchemist, then perhaps their re-wards will be sweet. If we begin to see

the relationships, the underlying webs in nature and culture, like the symbiotic relationship of the bees and fl owers, per-haps we will make decisions based on a more sustainable future for our glob-al environment and collective culture.

Thank you and Bee the Change…..

There are as many reasons for en-tering your mead into a competition as there are mead makers. My own reasons include the judge’s feedback so I can make better mead, but I will also confess to a desire for peer ap-proval. For the amateur it is bragging rights. For the commercial Meadery an award can be used as a marketing tool. Whatever your reason there is no shortage of competitions, from the local County Fair to the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition. Held every March in Boulder, Colo-rado the Mazer Cup is the Super Bowl of mead competitions. It is the largest Mead only competition in the world. A brief history of the Mazer Cup can be found in the fi rst issue of this news-letter, The Story Behind the AMMA.

If you choose to participate it takes a little planning. We recommend you set aside several unlabeled bottles from each batch. Most competitions require at least two 750ml bottles per entry, while a few require up to six. You should also consider the cost of entry as well as shipping. Most amateur entries run less than $8.00, while the commercial competitions can be upwards of $85.00 per entry.

When it comes to shipping you should be aware it is prohibited to ship al-coholic beverages through the U.S. Postal Service. However, it is not against any Bureau of Alcohol, To-bacco and Firearms (ATF), Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) regulations or federal laws to

ship using a privately owned ship-ping company For Analytical Pur-poses. Remember private shipping companies have the right to refuse your shipment. If you are shipping internationally there are internation-al treaties and customs to consider. Your package may be subject to ad-ditional documentation, fees and in-spections. Find the FedEx rules here: http://www.fedex.com/us/interna-tional/wine-shipping/index.html and UPS here: http://www.ups.com/wine.

Packaging is very important. You should consider not only the protec-tion of your mead during shipping but how the recipient on the other end will manage your package and shipping material. The easiest way to ship is using wine shippers such as the ones available through The Vintner’s Vault online at http://www.thevint-nervault.com/ Look in their Tast-ing Room Accessories. Box Vendor http://www.boxvendor.com/index.aspx also carries a line of shippers.

If you don’t want to use wine ship-pers then here are our recommenda-tions. Select a good cardboard box that is not all beat up. Keep in mind

most boxes are designed to with-stand a certain amount of weight and abuse. If there are tears or creases in the sides and corners it will not pro-vide adequate protection for your Mead. Line the box with a trash bag. This will help keep your mead from leaking out in the event of a broken bottle. Try to avoid using “peanuts”. These cause a bit of a mess when unpacking and many landfi lls will not accept them. Use bubble wrap instead. Seal each bottle in its own ziplock bag. In the event a bottle is damaged the glass will be contained and maybe even the contents. Do not over pack your box. Six bottles with packing material puts a box at around 20 pounds. Place your paperwork and payment inside a ziplock bag as well.

Here is a partial list of competitions that take mead. Good luck and enjoy.

Arizona Mead Cuphttp://www.brewarizona.org/mead-Cup.html Phoenix, AZ Amateur Mead Only March 2/12oz or 3/7oz $8.00 ea

Clark County Fairhttp://www.clarkcofair.com/ Van-couver, WA Amateur Beer/Mead August No fee

Domras Cuphttp://www.savannahbrewers.com/domrascup.php Savannah, GA Amateur Mead Only February 1/750ml or2/16oz $6.00 ea

The Evergreen State Fairhttp://www.evergreenfair.org/open-class.asp Monroe, WA Amateur Beer/Mead August 2/750ml No fee

Finger Lakes International Wine Competitionhttp://www.fl iwc.com/ Mendon, NY 2000 Professional Wine/Mead March 4/750ml or 3/375ml $50.00 ea

Homebrew at the W.E.B. Home-brew Competitionhttps://www.facebook.com/events/304357922926499/ Fran-kenmuth, MI Amateur Beer/Mead March

Indiana Wine Competitionhttp://www.indyinternational.org/ Purdue U., W. Lafayette, IN Pro-AM All August

International Eastern Wine Compe-titionhttp://www.winecompetitions.com/ Sonoma, CA Professional Wine/Mead February 4/750ml or 6/350ml $75.00 ea

International Women’s Wine Com-petitionhttp://www.winecompetitions.com/ Sonoma, CA Professional All November 4/750ml or 6/350ml $65.00 ea

Los Angeles Int’l Wine & Spirits Competitionhttp://www.fairplex.com/wos/wine_competition/ Los Angeles, CAWine/Mead May $75.00 for 6 en-tries

The Mazer Cup Int’l Mead Compe-titionhttp://www.mazercup.com/ Boul-der, CO Pro-Am Mead Only March 2/375ml

Comps Continued:

Mead Free or Diehttp://www.meadfreeordie.com/ Londonderry, NH Amateur Mead Only August 1/750ml $6.00 ea

Meadleniumhttp://www.cfhb.org/meadlennium/ Sanford, FL Amateur Mead Only May 2/750ml $6.00 ea

Michigan Mead Cup & Honey Fes-tivalhttp://www.michiganhoneyfestival.org/ Metamora, MI 2012 Pro-Am Mead Only July

Midwinter Homebrew Competitionhttp://midwinterhbc.beerbarons.org/index.php Milwaukee, WI Ama-teur Beer Cider Mead February 2/12oz $8.00 ea

Muse Cuphttp://muse.liquidpoets.com/ Ft Collins, CO2008 Amateur Mead Only Septem-ber 2/22oz $6.00 ea

NextGen Wine Competitionhttp://www.winecompetitions.com/ Santa Rosa, CA2008 Professional All September 4/750ml or 6/350ml $65.00 ea

Puyallup Fairhttp://www.thefair.com/site-infor-mation/page/how-to-participate/exhibit-entries/ Puyallup, WAAmateur All September 2/750ml $3.00 ea

San Diego Int’l Wine Competitionhttp://www.sdiwc.com/ San Di-ego, CA Professional All April 6/750ml or 8 375ml $75.00 ea

San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competitionhttp://winejudging.com/index.html San Francisco, CA Professional All February

San Francisco Int’l Wine Competi-tionhttp://www.sfwinecomp.com/ San Francisco, CA Professional All June 5/750ml $85.00 ea

Texas Mead Festivalhttps://www.facebook.com/events/381800068528305/ La Grange, TX Amateur Mead Only September

Tri-Cities Wine Festivalhttp://www.tcwinefest.com/index.html Kennewick, WA Professional All November

U.S. National Wine Competitionhttp://www.winecompetitions.com/ Sonoma, CA Professional All March 4/750ml or 6/350ml $75.00 ea

Valhalla-The Meading of Life com-petitionhttp://www.valhalla-mead.com/ West Chester, PA2004 Amateur Mead Only October 1/750ml or 2/22oz $7.00 ea

Washington Mead & Cider Cuphttp://www.gebl.org/articles/2012-washington-mead-cider-cup/ Ever-ett, WA Amateur Mead & Cider December 2/12 oz, 2/375ml or 1/750ml $7.00 ea

West Coast Wine Competitionhttp://www.winecompetitions.com/ Sonoma, CA Professional All July 4/750ml or 6/350ml $55.00 ea

Wine Maker Int’l Amateur Wine Competitionhttp://winemakermag.com/competi-tion Manchester Center, VT Ama-teur All April 1/750ml or 1/22oz for meads $25.00 ea Limit 15

When you win a medal in one of these competitions, send us a photo of you, your mead, and your recipe. We will be happy to publish the results of your success!

Now go make some mead!

Enjoy this parting image by Melissa Hronkin...

american mead maker spring 2013

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